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  1. - Top - End - #481
    Firbolg in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    Well, it's taken me four months to get to it properly, but if anyone's still interested, here is my account of Serpentine's last two weeks in this country.
    "'But there's still such a lot to be done...'
    YES. THERE ALWAYS IS."

  2. - Top - End - #482
    Colossus in the Playground
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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    I've been back in Australia for... my God, 4 months! Geeze I'm bad at this. I know most likely no one cares any more (not entirely sure why anyone cared in the first place...), but my Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit would be incomplete without this final entry, even if it is ridiculously late. So, here it is:

    Postscript: Farewell To Old England Forever... And I'm Bound For Botany Bay
    Spoiler
    Show
    I swear I had that song stuck in my head the whole trip home...
    The flight home, aside from being pretty uncomfortable and long and horrible, was bitter-sweet. The actual departure from London was anticlimactic due to the flight cancellation, but it was when the plane hit the shores of Australia, the sight of the long, rippled, bright red desert stretching on for hours and hours far below, that it really hit me that an important, out-of-the-ordinary (but hopefully not unique) chapter of my life was over, and a new one was about to begin. And so I left the Old Bailey and my rum culls, and landed back home in Botany Bay.

    At the beginning of this diary, about 13 months ago, I set out a “background” section that I never got around to filling in. It was going to talk about how I felt like I'd wasted the previous 2 or 3 years of my life, and how I felt like I'd fallen behind my peers – anyone, it seemed, who wanted to travel had already done so, and anyone who didn't had already set off on their lives and careers and everything. It was also going to talk about how I'd always, ALWAYS wanted to travel, how I wanted to see everything, do (nearly) everything, experience everything, good and bad, and about how I had this fear of missing out. And it probably would've included something about how I wanted to meet some more of the great people of the Playground. Buuuuuut it didn't, for reasons similar to those that resulted in this entry being 4 months late.
    So, what did I want from this trip to the other side of the world? To get out of my rut and set out to fulfil one of my greatest desires, I suppose. To see as much of the world as I possibly could, certainly. To... is there a non-tacky way of saying “grow as a person”? To prove to everyone – particularly myself – that I could do it, I guess. To make, or cement, some new friendships, perhaps. To have fun.
    And did I get that? Bit of a mixed bag, really. The friendships part of it far surpassed even some of my wildest expectations, that's for sure. I've proven to myself that I can do it, too, albeit with some new knowledge of my flaws and limitations which I'd need to work on mitigating next time – and I can tell you now there will be a next time, so long as I live and breathe – and I'll feel like I've properly gotten out of aforementioned rut when I get a proper job and can start saving up to do it again (don't question it, there is logic there. Sorta). And my mum reckons I'm different now so, you know, there's that. And yeah, I had an incredible time.
    The seeing as much of the world as possible bit... That I didn't do so great in. I screwed up seriously badly with my budget, and it was far more difficult to get a job over there than I expected it to be. My plan was to find work with which I would fund further travel through Europe and maybe further, and that aspect was an abject failure. I got Indonesia and I got the UK, and even then I had to depend heavily on charity and favours, and in the end I still owe my father $2000 he lent me so I could get back home again when I had to throw in the towel – a deeply disappointing outcome.
    I think I'm being unfair to myself by calling it “throwing in the towel”, though. In that regard, at least, I stuck to my plan perfectly. The plan was always that I would get to July, see where I'm up to and what job prospects I had and whether there was anything more I wanted to do this time, and decide whether to head home or settle in longer-term. And I decided to come home. But before that – thanks to the kindness of my Playground friends and in the end the amazing support of my parents (my dad for getting me home, and my mum for making sure I got to do some proper touristing in my last weeks) – I got to cram in a huge mass of incredible experiences.

    I really threw myself into the deep end of “experiences” by going to Indonesia first. Now that was an experience and a half. My time there was a befuddling mix of beauty, exoticness, and complete and utter relaxation, and uncomfortable situations, griminess and Western guilt. There are some things that will definitely stick with me about Indonesia, certainly.
    It sounds kind of superficial, but one of those things is just the fruit. I've never been that much of a fan of coconut, for example, but apparently that was because I'd never had one green. Words cannot describe how sublimely refreshing a freshly-cut green coconut for breakfast is, pouring the clear, gently sweet water into a glass to drink and scraping out the jellied flesh with a spoon. But coconut wasn't the only fruit there. There were stalls everywhere, each one literally piled up with rambutans and bananas and mangoes and so many others, all of them (except mangoes, surprisingly) so much more delicious and flavoursome than what you could get back in Australia, and all beyond dirt cheap.
    Another thing was the ubiquitousness of religion. In Bali it was the huge, dramatic statues of deities in the roads, the shrine on every property – and the businesses selling them – and the little offering dishes just everywhere – at shrines, obviously, but also on doorsteps, in windows, on footpaths, in the middle of the road, on the beach... Everywhere. In Lombok, it was the multiple mosques almost always within sight, and the call to prayer that echoed across the rice paddies and palm-covered hills like the lamentations of a mourning god, beautiful, haunting and omnipresent.
    On a far less dignified note, another thing that really left an impression on me for some reason was the toilets. The sheer variety of them just boggled my mind – and holidays in tropical paradises being what they are, I became intimately familiar with them. But I talked about them at great length at the time.
    On the less good end of things, the other thing that had a lasting impact was two boys, one in Lombok and one in Bali. The less said about them the better, but they were a significant part of my experience of Indonesia, for better or worse.
    One of my long-standing goals since high school has been to see Borobudur in Java. Sadly I wasn't, in the end, able to do that this time. But I got to see plenty of other things I never even thought to see, thanks largely to my cousins, and it just gives me a reason to go back there. And I think I would like to go there again.

    I knew that Indonesia was going to be incredibly exotic and strange and unfamiliar. I think that maybe I underestimated how much the UK would be those things, as well. Sure, we share a language (mostly...) and a cultural background, but still there were so many things that were just... different. A lot of it was in teeny tiny little things: KFC coming with a side of baked beans instead of terrible mashed potato and gravy, for example; and nearly everything about fish and chip shops – not least the curry sauce; and the glorious array of dramatically different accents everywhere.
    A lot more was in the landscapes: the houses all stuck together; the garden lots scattered around the towns (which I think are a brilliant idea, by the way); the way the streets work and the cool old Edwardian buildings in some towns; the gorgeous, bright green, gently rolling hills and the soggy moors; the miles and miles of drystone walls of indeterminate age; the unrelentingly grey skies; and the random castles and remnants of a bygone era scattered around and largely ignored by the people around them.
    Some of it was in the people, too: in the (to my mind) excessive use of diminutives that could get you a stern glaring-at in Australia; and the Geordies. Oh, the orange, extensioned Geordies... I think one of the things I found the strangest about the people there, though, was how little most of them seemed to know about their own country. Birds was probably the main subject that was illustrated with: ask an Australian to name some Australian birds, and probably even the least educated or interested would be able rattle off a dozen-odd, and have a decent shot at identifying most of them, and if in doubt I think most houses have a bird book (I know I could pick out at least a couple score, and narrow down a score more by rough type; my mother, using a couple of bird books, identified more than 100 different species in her area). In the UK, I'd point out what appeared to be a fairly common bird to someone, ask what it was, and be met with a shrug and a funny look. I did that with maybe half a dozen of what I'd've thought were pretty intelligent, aware people, and pretty much the only one who knew anything about British birds was --Lime--. And it wasn't just birds, either, but other animals and landmarks and the like. It was just... odd. I wonder what the difference is.
    Weirdness and random differences aside, I loved Britain. I loved that proper snow was just weather, not something you went on holiday to find. I loved playing the Spot The Thing That's Older Than My Country game. I adored the architecture and the animals (squirrels! BADGER!), and I loved discovering every new and strange little custom or feature. I loved the castles – and I want to go back and investigate that mysterious tower thing I saw from the window of the train between Largs and Glasgow. I loved the stony beaches, I loved my spring birthday and my amazing snake cake, I loved the accents, I loved the flowers and the way everyone assumed I was a Kiwi first and everywhere felt like the suburbs of a big city, whether it was in the country or in the middle of London (even if that was a source of stress for a while) and the public transport (trust me, after coming back home to Australia, I love the UK's public transport). But most of all, more than anything else in the whole trip, I loved the Playgrounders I met there.

    Yeah yeah, the usual old sickly-sweet forum sycophancy... But I couldn't be more serious about this if I tried. I can't remember what I was expecting of the people I'd meet in the UK, except that I was bracing myself for a creep or two (there were so many there willing at least to meet me, I figured, that if one of them turned out to be an axe murderiser, I'd always have someone at whose place I could hide). I don't think, though, that I was expecting to get along so well with so many of them. There wasn't a single Playgrounder I met whom I disliked, and there were a great many with whom I got along incredibly well (at least, I think we did...), and far too many to whom I owe a great debt of one kind or another.
    It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that I would have been screwed without the forum network – at minimum, my trip would've been shorter by months. There was Archonic_Energy, who picked me up and saw me off, and to whom I still have to send the money to post me back the bag he very kindly and totally voluntarily holds for me, and The Succubus who let me stay at his place a couple of times and won't tell me how much it cost to post my suitcase. There's KuReshtin who not only gave me a bed to sleep on but who also took me to buy some clothes until the aforementioned suitcase turned up, and by that same score Totally Guy upon whose charity I ended up having to totally throw myself for a month when my funds completely ran out. There's Qwaz, who gave me a job and a place to live (with reasonable rent) indefinitely, and Thufir and Tasroth and their family who paid for innumerable little bits and pieces and took me on wonderful outings and generally made me feel incredibly at home, and GrlumpTheElder who spotted me a meal when I humiliated myself by having less money than I thought, and --Lime-- who, miracle of miracles, managed to find not one, but two beers that I actually liked, his shout. And Lesser_Minion, who bought dinner for Thufir and I in Bath. I feel sure I'm missing someone else, too...

    Even more than this incredible assistance I received – the substance of and appreciation for which I cannot overstate – were the friendships I formed. I've always been... slightly off, just a bit out of whack with everyone else, even the people I really liked. It was truly amazing to me to find so many of My Sort of People – people with whom I had an instant connection to and who seemed to really understand me, and I them. I have no doubt that the forums helped that a lot – we already “knew” one another, for the most part, more or less; we had background, shared stories, known common ground, that sort of thing. But you can't really know for sure how well you'll get along with someone until you've met them in person; even with our forum background, there were one or two people, for example, with whom, although I still liked them a lot, I clicked just a bit less than I expected to; conversely, there were also one or two people who, although I didn't dislike them on the forums or anything, I got along with far, FAR better than I was expecting to – Thufir and GrlumpTheElder come most particularly to mind. And then there were the people I'd never, or barely, even talked to on the forum – Sinderman, --Lime-- and Qwaz, for example – who I ended up utterly adoring (even if Sinderman was kinda intimidating sometimes...).
    And so it is that one of the greatest and most lasting impacts of my first-ever trip outside of Australia was the genuine, really good friendships I formed there. There's heaps of them – a dozen or more; you can probably guess who you are – people who I now truly consider my friends. The stand-outs, the people whom I'd now consider among my very best and closest friends include Tasroth, Totally Guy, Qwaz, GrlumpTheElder (still shamelessly my favourite), --Lime--, and Thufir – always Thufir, my wonderful constant companion in the last few weeks of my trip and who probably, for better or worse, now knows me better than nearly anyone in the world. But all of my Playgrounders, every one I met and spent any time with, I love you all with all my heart. Bask or gag, at your discretion.

    A while ago, there were a bunch of internet mini-episode things for Doctor Who. In one of them – or was it a deleted scene? - Amy badgered the Doctor into telling her why he always had a companion. “Because I can't see it anymore”, he snaps at her. “I look at a star and it's just a big ball of burning gas and I know how it began and I know how it ends and I was probably there both times. After a while, everything is just stuff. That's the problem. You make all of space and time your backyard and what do you have? A backyard. But you, you can see it. And when you see it, I see it.”
    I think I saw that somewhere near when I left the UK, and it really struck a nerve with me. I sort of felt an echo with it, in two different – neither really directly analogous – ways:
    In the first, when I was in the UK I was the companion and my friends there were the Doctor but didn't know it. I was running around, trying to make them see, trying to show them how amazing their little bit of the universe was. How cool was that hundreds-of-years-old pub? How pretty are those hills? So many daffodils on that hill! What's with all those walls everywhere? You went to school in a thousand year old abbey dedicated to a famous medieval battle, can't you see how bizarre that is? Your town is protected by a wall, can't you see how cool that is? You live in a city named after a castle and it actually has that castle in it, isn't that amazing? Squirrels! BADGER! It was almost painful, how blasé everyone was in the face of all this incredible stuff they lived with and around every day. I hope that, at least to some degree, if only for a little while, I managed to help my British friends see their world a bit differently.
    The second was from the other side of it. Being somewhere new, I was actually, properly looking at everything, paying attention to all the details and taking it all in. I was seeing my surroundings in a way I'd never thought to look at home. And, even before I got home, I started looking at it differently. Stuff that was normal to me, I was realising – I mean, I already knew, but now I really knew – is actually, in the global scheme of things, pretty weird. Why does KFC in Australia come with that awful mashed potato? At some point, decisions were made that lead to different fast food sides being the default for the UK and for Australia, and a thousand other little differences like that. What were they, who made them and why did they go the ways they did? I started thinking about bird calls differently: where before kookaburras and cockatoos were more or less just background noise, when they weren't around they suddenly became home, and I missed them.
    It kept going when I got back Down Under, too. Things like all those flowers I marvelled at in Britain. It seemed so strange but wonderful, to have all these pots of bright colour all through the cities, and hill slopes absolutely covered in daffodils. I'd never seen anything like it, so I told people. But then I got back to Australia, and I couldn't stop seeing flowers everywhere. We might not have quite as many all over the place, hanging from skyscrapers and the like, but it's not as though we're lacking them, either. I'd just never really noticed them properly before, never seen them because I wasn't looking right.
    And our mountains... I'd always been a bit disparaging of our mountains, because on a global scale they're barely mountains anymore. They're so old and so worn down, I'm sure they're nothing to compare to the mighty ranges of Europe and America. Granted, I didn't exactly find the Rockies in Britain – although to be fair I never made it right up to the Scottish Highlands. I did see their famous rolling hills, though; the great, gentle waves of bright green dotted with funny-looking sheep and, occasionally, snow. And even though they weren't huge, they did make me look at Australia's mountains differently. British hills are smooth and picturesque and tamed and beautiful, but Australia's hills are interesting. Maybe after 3000 years of agriculture our ranges would be domesticated as well, but I doubt you'd ever get emerald swathes out of those cliffs and boulders and weird jutting... bits. And suddenly, I appreciate Australia's landscape that bit more.
    Things like our beaches and trees, too, I came back looking at differently, seeing properly for the first time how truly unique and definitive and so home they are, but I've been going on about it too much already. It's enough to say that I came back to my homeland with a very new impression of it, a greater appreciation for what makes it fantastic and weird compared with the rest of the world, and with one profound conclusion: I want to share it.

    I want to show people my home. I want to take the people to whom I went on about how weird their country was, and show them what I was comparing it to so they can see how weird it is too, like I saw how weird mine is. I want to be dragged around by someone gaping in wonder at all the stuff I find so mundane, like I dragged Tasroth and Totally Guy and --Lime-- around. I want them to show me things I see every day, show me how amazing they are. I want to show them that, even if they have pubs and college dorms that are older than my country, we have paintings and cultures that are more ancient than even the very concept of “country”. I want to show them our squeaky beaches and the kangaroos on the roads at night and our bright red desert sands. And I want the motivation to actually get up and go see those things that having someone to show them to will bring.
    And after that, I want to travel the world again, and see more weird and wonderful things that make me appreciate even more how weird and wonderful Australia is. I want to meet even more Playgrounders and share their worlds with them for a little while. I still want to see everything, experience everything, go everywhere, meet everyone... And I want to do it with you.
    So that's my invitation to you, to the Playground. Come visit me, and explore my home with me, and show me what I see every day. And maybe, when I get everything sorted out and can save up money again, I'll come do the same thing for you.

    Come walk with me.


    Acknowledgements
    In approximate chronological order
    The Parental Units: Lent or gave me a loooooooot of money.
    My Cousins Sam and Jade: Let me stay with them and showed me around Indonesia.
    Archonic_Energy: Waited around the airport for me far, far too long, provided a friendly(ish) face when I arrived in a strange land, gave me a place to shower and sleep, shouted me some meals, etc.
    The Succubus: Shipped me my suitcase so that I didn't have to way 3 weeks for all my stuff, spotted me some not insignificant amounts of money.
    KuReshtin: Bought me some clothes and stuff to do me 'til my suitcase arrived, let me live with him for a few months, drove me 'round, didn't nag me about the rent when it took me ages to pay him back.
    Dvil: Took me on a great not-a-date.
    Tasroth: Showed me around Newcastle and stuff. Probably lent me some money at some point, too.
    Thufir: Joined me on adventures and was a huge moral support so many times.
    Thufir & Tasroth's Parents: Let me stay at theirs several times, fed me, took me on outings, and generally made me feel welcome.
    GrlumpTheElder: Shouted me a meal (this is a distressing theme...), showed me around Hastings, was generally adorable.
    Totally Guy: Let me stay with him, fed me, and generally kept me for a month and about a week before that.
    --Lime--: Showed me York, helped me look for work and bought me beer and a lovely dinner.
    Qwaz: Gave me a job and somewhere to live indefinitely. Doesn't get much bigger than that.
    and finally: The people reading this thread, because your judging eyes gave me that bit more motivation to make sure I got out and did interesting things.

    I've missed someone... Who've I missed? If I missed you, or you know someone else who helped me in some way, please let me know.
    Last edited by Serpentine; 2013-01-24 at 08:06 AM.

  3. - Top - End - #483
    Colossus in the Playground
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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    And there we are. We're done. That's all there is, there isn't any more.

  4. - Top - End - #484
    Colossus in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    *claps* Bravo! That was an awesome summation, Serps. (Even if you didn't include me in your list, at least I'm apparently not too creepy or axe-murderish, which is cool ).

  5. - Top - End - #485
    Colossus in the Playground
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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    Oh feck, I forgot a bit!
    ...you won't be in that either, though 'fraid we just didn't talk very much. I don't dislike you, though

  6. - Top - End - #486
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    Totally Guy's Avatar

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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    I want to show people my home. I want to take the people to whom I went on about how weird their country was, and show them what I was comparing it to so they can see how weird it is too, like I saw how weird mine is.
    This I promise.

    Thanks for sharing! I noticed your surprise at a lot our general ignorance and if we were actually clever that Doctor Who analogy would go with it perfectly.

    Tell me more about the odd diminuitives... I can't say I notice that one.
    Mannerism RPG An RPG in which your descriptions resolve your actions and sculpts your growth.

  7. - Top - End - #487
    Firbolg in the Playground
     
    Thufir's Avatar

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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    It was going to talk about how I felt like I'd wasted the previous 2 or 3 years of my life, and how I felt like I'd fallen behind my peers – anyone, it seemed, who wanted to travel had already done so, and anyone who didn't had already set off on their lives and careers and everything.
    Geez, how much are we the same person?

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    and the glorious array of dramatically different accents everywhere.
    In contrast to Australia? Do Australians not have different accents?

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    (squirrels! BADGER!)
    You're funny.

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    and Thufir – always Thufir, my wonderful constant companion in the last few weeks of my trip and who probably, for better or worse, now knows me better than nearly anyone in the world.


    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    A while ago, there were a bunch of internet mini-episode things for Doctor Who. In one of them – or was it a deleted scene? - Amy badgered the Doctor into telling her why he always had a companion. “Because I can't see it anymore”, he snaps at her. “I look at a star and it's just a big ball of burning gas and I know how it began and I know how it ends and I was probably there both times. After a while, everything is just stuff. That's the problem. You make all of space and time your backyard and what do you have? A backyard. But you, you can see it. And when you see it, I see it.”
    I think I saw that somewhere near when I left the UK, and it really struck a nerve with me. I sort of felt an echo with it, in two different – neither really directly analogous – ways:
    In the first, when I was in the UK I was the companion and my friends there were the Doctor but didn't know it. I was running around, trying to make them see, trying to show them how amazing their little bit of the universe was. How cool was that hundreds-of-years-old pub? How pretty are those hills? So many daffodils on that hill! What's with all those walls everywhere? You went to school in a thousand year old abbey dedicated to a famous medieval battle, can't you see how bizarre that is? Your town is protected by a wall, can't you see how cool that is? You live in a city named after a castle and it actually has that castle in it, isn't that amazing? Squirrels! BADGER! It was almost painful, how blasé everyone was in the face of all this incredible stuff they lived with and around every day. I hope that, at least to some degree, if only for a little while, I managed to help my British friends see their world a bit differently.
    It's not a deleted scene, it was filmed specifically to be only on the DVDs, and it fills in the gap between episodes 5 & 6 of series 5.
    I love that scene, and I'm now even more glad that I showed it to you, because that does actually make a lot of sense, since a bunch of times we did have that sort of conversation where you'd go on about something and I'd be like "Yeah, I guess it is pretty neat, when you stop and think about it."
    Also, I approve of any analogy in which I am the Doctor.

    As to us being blase - I think it's kind of just how we are as a people. I mean, in the introduction to Flanders and Swann's Song of Patriotic Prejudice, whichever one of them it is talks about how the English never we really went in for nationalism, because "We'd got pretty much everything we wanted, and we didn't feel the need to go around telling people how marvelous we were, everybody knew that!" And at the end he mentions typical English understatement. Of course all this is done in a mocking way, but it's also kind of true. I'd say there's a fairly pervasive attitude in England of not making a big deal of things.

    Quote Originally Posted by A hypothetical Englishman
    "Nothing here of particular interest. Well, I mean I suppose the countryside is quite nice, and perhaps there are a few sites of historical interest dotted about the place, centuries-old castles and that sort of thing... I'm not sure quite how many, it's not like we're keeping score you know, but quite a few, I believe. Not much worth mentioning though."
    See? Totally believable.

    Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
    The second was from the other side of it. Being somewhere new, I was actually, properly looking at everything, paying attention to all the details and taking it all in. I was seeing my surroundings in a way I'd never thought to look at home. And, even before I got home, I started looking at it differently. Stuff that was normal to me, I was realising – I mean, I already knew, but now I really knew – is actually, in the global scheme of things, pretty weird. Why does KFC in Australia come with that awful mashed potato? At some point, decisions were made that lead to different fast food sides being the default for the UK and for Australia, and a thousand other little differences like that. What were they, who made them and why did they go the ways they did? I started thinking about bird calls differently: where before kookaburras and cockatoos were more or less just background noise, when they weren't around they suddenly became home, and I missed them.
    It kept going when I got back Down Under, too. Things like all those flowers I marvelled at in Britain. It seemed so strange but wonderful, to have all these pots of bright colour all through the cities, and hill slopes absolutely covered in daffodils. I'd never seen anything like it, so I told people. But then I got back to Australia, and I couldn't stop seeing flowers everywhere. We might not have quite as many all over the place, hanging from skyscrapers and the like, but it's not as though we're lacking them, either. I'd just never really noticed them properly before, never seen them because I wasn't looking right.
    And our mountains... I'd always been a bit disparaging of our mountains, because on a global scale they're barely mountains anymore. They're so old and so worn down, I'm sure they're nothing to compare to the mighty ranges of Europe and America. Granted, I didn't exactly find the Rockies in Britain – although to be fair I never made it right up to the Scottish Highlands. I did see their famous rolling hills, though; the great, gentle waves of bright green dotted with funny-looking sheep and, occasionally, snow. And even though they weren't huge, they did make me look at Australia's mountains differently. British hills are smooth and picturesque and tamed and beautiful, but Australia's hills are interesting. Maybe after 3000 years of agriculture our ranges would be domesticated as well, but I doubt you'd ever get emerald swathes out of those cliffs and boulders and weird jutting... bits. And suddenly, I appreciate Australia's landscape that bit more.
    Things like our beaches and trees, too, I came back looking at differently, seeing properly for the first time how truly unique and definitive and so home they are, but I've been going on about it too much already. It's enough to say that I came back to my homeland with a very new impression of it, a greater appreciation for what makes it fantastic and weird compared with the rest of the world, and with one profound conclusion: I want to share it.
    That I actually get. You appreciate things much more in contrast to how they are elsewhere than you do just experiencing them every day with no basis for comparison.

    Quote Originally Posted by Totally Guy View Post
    Tell me more about the odd diminuitives... I can't say I notice that one.
    Yeah, I've no idea what you meant by that.
    Last edited by Thufir; 2013-01-24 at 12:24 PM.
    "'But there's still such a lot to be done...'
    YES. THERE ALWAYS IS."

  8. - Top - End - #488
    Colossus in the Playground
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    Default Re: Serpentine's Travel Diary Thingo-Whatsit

    Re. Accents: I talked about this all the time. Coming back, it looks like we have more than I thought, but still no more than about half a dozen, and they're all (except maybe Ocker) far more subtle than the different British accents. We just haven't been around long enough, and isolated enough for enough of that time, to really differentiate like you have there.
    Related: apparently the Australian accent is one of the weakest around, inasmuch as if we travel elsewhere we tend to lose it a lot faster than other people.

    Re. Diminutives: it is a bit of a regional and individual thing; Londoners and Geordies seem to be the biggest culprits. Qwaz is an archetypical example, with all his "loves". If he tried that in Australia... Well, he's actually probably get away with it because he's attractive and has an accent. But if an Aussie bloke talked to girls like he does, he'd be seen as a condescending sexist bastard. I know it's gotten my back up, before - did when I got to the UK, until I got used to it - and usually here it's older men "from a bygone era" who can't be expected to know better who do it consistently.
    On the other hand, I think there's a bit of a double standard in this regard; I know plenty of women (I'm not really one of them, but my sister is) who use pet names for everyone, male and female, and that's considered fine (kinda annoys me a bit sometimes, but I'm not Society).

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